Postcolonialism 2 Flashcards
Hall (1995)
Asserts that the term postcolonial is not merely descriptive of this society rather than that, or then and now. It is instead “part of an essentially transnational and transcultural global process”. There is not a clear distinction between colonial rule and the present. The power of knowledge and representation still exist in relationships of power and control.
The term postcolonialism helps us to describe or characterise the shift in global relations which marks the necessarily uneven transition between the age of empires to the post-independence or decolonisation moment.
We also need to recognise that attempting to recover alternative histories that have not been contaminated by colonisation is not possible (so deeply embedded into culture)
This article addresses the critiques of the postcolonial approach. Hall suggests that there is a certain nostalgia running through some of the arguments for a return to clear-cut politics of binary opposition. There are distinctions that need to be made, without doing so weakens the use of the term postcolonial (is the US a colonised country, for example).
Marx (1853)
As Marx (1853) declared, “they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”.
We never learn about what indigenous people have to say about how colonialism was received- we only learn about this through the narratives of colonialists themselves.
In a similar light- we never hear about the working-class perspective of capitalism, simply from bourgeoisie journalism. It is clear that the subject is always deprived of a voice in representation.
Said (1978)
Said (1978) seeks to understand to what extent does the discourse of orientalism match up with the actual ‘Orient’?
Orientalism has three different layers:
1) A field of academic research
This is the formal study of the orient that aims to consolidate certain ways of seeing and thinking about the orient. This began in the 18th century; “dealing with [the Orient] by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it and ruling over it”
2) A style of thought
These are everyday imaginative geographies which inspire the fact that there is a natural distinction between the Orient and the Occident. “So authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by the Orientalism”
3) A western style of domination
The two points above are mobilised to legitimise certain forms of control over the Orient- colonialism, for example.
Said (1978) claims that without examining Orientalism, “one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period…”
Everything people KNEW about the Orient was fundamentally a discourse. BUT, thus has very little basis in what people were in themselves. Knowing an entire region (almost half the world) through a singular lens.
Embedded within orientalism is the process of ‘othering’. Said (1978) states that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”
This started a set of binary representations between the West and the Orient. These discourses said NOTHING about the actual Orient, but rather focused on saying something about Europe. This was done by contrasting the two regions to learn about ourselves- primitive/civilised.
There are some critiques to this process…
a) If the discourse was so omnipotent and omnipotent is there any room for the ‘other’s’ voice or representation?
b) Vaughan (1994) argues that the colonial subject is reduced to having no independent existence outside of the Orientalist literature
c) At a theoretical level, Said appears to have placed himself in the position of denying the possibility of any alternative description of the Orient.
Vaughan (1994)
Vaughan (1994) argues that the colonial subject is reduced to having no independent existence outside of the Orientalist literature
Gramsci (1971)
Used the term subaltern to refer to social groups who were “always subject to the activity of ruling groups”.
Subalternity and hegemony exist in a dialectical relation to one another.
Spivak (1988)
Spivak (1988) was wary of the ‘recovery’ of the ‘voice/agency’ of colonised or subaltern subjects. She questions how we can recover the voices of the people if the language used is that of the coloniser.
There are already embedded power relations existing here; language is incredibly powerful. Arguably it underplays the sheer power of colonial power that re-wrote intellectual, legal, and cultural systems.
“A mother-tongue is a language with a history—in that sense it is ‘instituted’”
Spivak (1988) argued that human subjects are not fixed essences, but are discursively constituted. If we are products of language (born into a certain way of thinking) we are not born fixed subjects. Identities and subjectivities are constantly shifting and are fragmentary. This is already/always embedded in language
Additionally, Spivak (1988) also criticises the tendency to romanticise the subaltern/colonial subjects. She asserts that there is a tendency to believe that colonial subjects have some sort of inherent wisdom. BUT, this is not necessarily the case.
Bhabha (1994)
Homi Bhabha (1994) attempts to theorise Fanon’s (date) work in ‘Black skins, white masks’.
Argues that within the colonial project, there is an invitation to mimic white culture. Within colonial discourses, desires are produced. This desire is to become a certain type of man- the white colonial man.
This undercuts colonial hegemony- the very act of performing as non-white you are already performing difference. This is non-white performance. Black people are destabilising the colonial project the more that non-whites engage in it.
Bhabha (1994) thus argues for the notion of ‘Hybridity’. In the act of mimicry, colonial subjects are already hybrids. The colonial project is to undo a desire for essentialness. In the postcolonial “international culture, based not on the exoticism or multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity.”
“It is not the Colonialist Self or the Colonised Other, but the disturbing distance in between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness—the White man’s artifice inscribed on the Black man’s body”.
Fanon (1952)
Fanon describes race as a psychic condition of never attaining whiteness that colonial subjects were taught to desire. Black people have been instituted to desire whiteness- regardless of still being the other.
In everyday life there is a gap between black people and white people- despite promises made by the colonial project. To deconstruct this desire was through violence- to demolish colonial rule. Out of the ashes will be born a new type of man/subject.
Loomba (2005)
Colonialism was the means through which capitalism achieved its global expansion; racism simply facilitated this process. It was the conduit through which the labour of colonised people was appropriated. Consequently, economic explanations alone are not sufficient for understanding the racial features of colonised societies.
In Capital, Marx (1977, 170) suggested that capitalism depends upon the “free laborer selling his labour power” to the owner of the means of production. However, in South Africa (as in a variety of other colonial situations) the labour of colonized people was commissioned through a variety of coercive measures: it was not free labour at all.
Marxism attributes capitalism’s efficiency to having replaced slavery and crude forms of coercion with the ‘free’ labour market in which the force is exerted through economic pressure. BUT, under colonialism, features of supposedly outdates control carry on not as remnants of the past, but as integral features of the capitalist present. The ideology of racial superiority is easily translated into class terms; certain sections of people were radically identified as the natural working classes
Capitalism therefore does not override or liquidate racial hierarchies, but continues to depend upon and intensify them. The race relations put into place during colonialism survive long after many of the economic structures underlying them have changed.
“It is in the interest of capitalism that certain older social structures not be totally transformed”.
Jazeel (2014)
This paper explores the benefits of engaging with Spivak’s (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and postcolonialism
Subalternity is a word able to evoke spatialities occluded by the Euro-American power that haunts disciplinary geography- holds the potential to pluralize geographical interventions; a turn away from representation in geography. There is much to gain from treating subalternity, not just as a reference to subordinate groups, but as a figurative reference to the geographies occluded by the hegemonic conceptualizations of space.
Spivak’s intervention is to stress how in speaking for the subaltern, the subaltern is ideologically constituted as subaltern in a particular kind of way. The subaltern’s actual difference, her real agency, is epistemologically irretrievable for the postcolonial intellectual
Though Spivak never quite goes so far as admitting the subaltern can indeed speak, there is an important tension here that might be summed as follows… Yes, the subaltern spoke, but the true cadence of her voice continues to be effaced and then (re)constituted in different kinds of ways.
Fanon (1961)
Fanon characterizes the assessment of the native population by the settler class as dehumanizing. The settlers literally do not see the natives as members of the same species. Colonizers essentially create the colonial identity
The natives are incapable of ethics and thereby are the embodiment of absolute evil as opposed to the Christian settlers who are forces of good. This is crucial as it explains two things: the idea that decolonization is a replacement of populations and since the native know they are not animals, they immediately develop a feeling of rebellion against the settler. The first group to incite this violence are the working classes
Colonial subjects are kept submissive through overt exercises of power; colonial police, soldiers and the threat of violence. Even decolonization is a violent process (especially because this is repressed during colonial control).
During this time, colonial subjects direct their violence at the colonists themselves. Fanon describes a sort of domino effect of violence as well: once the colonized in one village use violence against the colonists, word spreads and soon there are more uprisings, more violent revolts.
Violence unites people across regions and tribes. It has a “cleansing force,” purging individuals of their inferiority complex and their former passivity
From violence emerges a unified fight against the colonists and the creation of a new, active, and liberated subjectivity to replace the earlier colonized subjectivity of submission and passivity.
Shohat (1992)
Criticises the postcolonial for its theoretical and political ambiguity- by blurring the clear-cut distinctions between colonisers and the colonised. This dissolves the politics of resistance because it posits no clear domination and calls for no clear opposition. The author identifies that we have come to realize that the ‘Wretched of the Earth’ are not unanimously revolutionary. There are not only conflicts between, but within, nation-states: with constant changing relations between dominant and subaltern groups.
